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Im Grünen, 1992, installation, Kokerei Zollverein, Essen, variable, photo: Roman Mensing
I believe that taking an original house as material works well as
a starting point in this matter. I then moved, as a German, in a house
where a Turkish family has been evicted from for not having paid
the rent.
¬ Was the owner acquainted with your intentions?
√ No. He wanted to know which my occupation was and I told
him: plumber. And he said: it’s excellent, since all the plumbs are
crashed. Otherwise I would have never got there.
¬ You have placed an announcement about the house in Berliner
Zeitung and in Süddeutsche Zeitung – from our times’ perspective
it’s an early example of “contextual art“.
√ Exactly. To the Sydney Biennale I did something in a Chinese
brothel. It was also expensive.
¬ At that time, “the Turkish house“ was too abruptly reduced to
the relation between fascism and the aversion towards strangers.
√ True. At that time, I did not quite have money and I had to work.
I had sent the film project to Wulf Herzogenrath, from the Kölnischer
Kunstverein in Cologne, and I received by mail the answer that they
did not support such a thing. Later, I have intensified this contextual
manner, for instance in Tankstelle Landsbergerstrasse [The Gas
station on Landsberg street].
¬ What did you do in the Chinese brothel?
√ Uhh, it was a pretty black thing, which I turned into something
even blacker. I removed the walls and I arranged the space.
The brothel was shortly to be demolished and a tower-block was
to be built instead. When you entered, you had the feeling that the
beds were still warm. It was as good as it got. Whoever entered was
astonished, since before this he/she had not dared to. Then the art
was searched for, and pretty promptly found, because I had redecorated
all the space.
¬ Are you hurt that your works have been more thematically and
less aesthetically received?
√ I think it’s a shame. It is completely weird that I’m called down
for doing nothing other than messing everything up. You have to
mess up the most beautiful place in order to move on. Most of the
people are too lazy to think or copy each other and are very resilient
to move spiritually. My signal word is subversion. When I was working
on Tankstelle Landsbergerstrasse, there were whores and workers
passing, and we were batting the breeze. I did not want to shut
other domains away from art, but to render it representable. This
does not go along with the museum.
¬ At the Württembergischer Kunstverein, in Stuttgart, you have
placed an oak-branches crown monument, in 1984, with the RAF 4 ’s
“Stammheim“ 5 -s.
√ It is not a monument, but a play upon the iconography of the
monument.
¬ Are you a RAF sympathizer?
√ It’s not about sympathy or antipathy, it’s about art. Such an idea
does not simply come out of the blue but it stems from the attentive
observation of the space, of the situation, of the times, of politics.
I was just coming back from Asia, and I was enjoying the coffee
as bad-tasty as ever. I had been invited to the Kunstlandschaft
Bundesrepublik Deutschland [FRG Artisticscape] exhibition.
They were all considerately hanging their paintings, and I did not
want to do this to myself. I looked at the small courtyard, which
resembles to a mortuary antechamber, and to the red curtains which
looked almost as robes. Just before that I had read in Spiegel an
interview with the general prosecutor Rebmann about the terrorist
Peter-Jürgen Boock. 6 Rebmann was saying there that Boock could
only ask for release in the first decades of the next century. With all
the pros and cons of the matter, there is already a certain cynicism
in this statement. I don’t know whether one can say such a thing.
In Stuttgart I visited the cemetery where the prisoners who had died
at Stammheim were buried. And thus, this work was cast as a mosaic.
It is also thus that the ice, into which many confided, hence forgetting
about the artistic qualities, was furbished.
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